Living in and with ruins: decolonizing spatial pedagogies in territories of conflict

This paper examines imperial and capitalist ruination as encompassing both epistemic and material forms of violence, focusing on how ruination is embedded in cultural mindsets and spatial pedagogies. Challenging the romantic view of ruins and situating them as part of human’s catastrophic mastery over nature, the paper turns to the pedagogical potential of Southern planetary struggles and resistance, bringing evidence from place-based learning projects in conflict-affected regions such as Cyprus and Palestine. Rather than looking at ruins mainly as sites for exposing imperialism, colonialism, and ethno-nationalisms—in their contested forms and legacies—it probes the question of how to live in and with ruins as the basis for imagining situated, posthuman, and transcalar spatial pedagogies. Addressing the legacies of ecological ruination, spatial pedagogies in Cyprus serve to challenge institutional and disciplinary boundaries, fostering collaboration and build commons across the island’s divided communities. In Palestine, where ongoing dispossession and militarized urbanism prevail, Indigenous-based spatial pedagogies take the form of experiments in living with ruins generating knowledge of how to inhabit the world through care, repair, and healing, while advocating for planetary justice.